Personal Experience, Benefits & Risks of Psychedelics | Tim Ferriss & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | I'd like to ask you about another area
00:00:05.080 | where you really have seemed to see around corners.
00:00:09.200 | And this is one that actually carried
00:00:12.440 | with it significant risk.
00:00:14.560 | Not necessarily risk to health and to life,
00:00:17.440 | but risk in terms of outside perceptions.
00:00:20.560 | And that's psychedelics.
00:00:22.840 | As you know, I've substantially changed my view on this.
00:00:26.360 | We don't need to go into my former stance on it.
00:00:28.560 | And I talked about that when you were gracious enough
00:00:30.520 | to host me on your podcast for a second time,
00:00:33.600 | done some psychedelics recreationally as a kid.
00:00:35.560 | It was correlated with not so great times in my life,
00:00:38.360 | stayed away from them, then eventually revisited MDMA
00:00:41.000 | in particular from a therapeutic standpoint,
00:00:43.040 | found tremendous benefit.
00:00:44.200 | Again, therapeutically with a medical doctor.
00:00:46.920 | Again, these drugs are illegal,
00:00:49.680 | soon to change perhaps, hopefully.
00:00:52.360 | And we'll talk about that.
00:00:53.680 | But it's becoming clear from the controlled studies
00:00:58.680 | by Robin Carter Harris.
00:01:01.160 | There are many others, Nolan Williams, others,
00:01:04.440 | that these drugs have enormous potential
00:01:08.080 | to help relieve depression, trauma,
00:01:10.860 | help people explore their psyche, their mind,
00:01:14.680 | for sake of feeling better, doing better in the world,
00:01:17.320 | for leaning into life, not tune in, drop out,
00:01:19.520 | but to really lean into life with more purpose
00:01:23.760 | and more satisfaction.
00:01:24.960 | In some cases, they've really have saved lives, I think.
00:01:28.500 | What was your mindset around psychedelics
00:01:32.880 | when you first started exploring them?
00:01:35.480 | What led you to overcome the inevitable fear gap there?
00:01:40.480 | Because you do seem like somebody
00:01:43.780 | who takes value in your health, right?
00:01:46.280 | You're not reckless.
00:01:47.680 | You may have been more adventurous in the past
00:01:49.760 | with things like, I hate the word,
00:01:51.400 | but biohacking and self-experimentation than you are now,
00:01:54.040 | but you obviously have some self-preservation mechanism
00:01:57.280 | intact. - We learn, we learn.
00:01:58.760 | - We learn.
00:01:59.920 | What was your mindset around it at the time?
00:02:02.160 | And then I want to get to what you've learned from it.
00:02:05.740 | And frankly, the tremendous efforts that you've put
00:02:10.360 | that are now translating to tremendous value
00:02:12.760 | for really millions of people.
00:02:14.600 | And ultimately, I think it's going to be billions of people
00:02:18.000 | by establishing funding for the pioneering research
00:02:21.360 | in this area, helping to promote the movement
00:02:24.560 | of these compounds from illegal to legal
00:02:27.080 | in the therapeutic setting, so on and so on.
00:02:30.000 | So take us back to your first thoughtful exploration
00:02:35.000 | of psychedelics.
00:02:36.200 | What'd that look like?
00:02:37.080 | You're like, oh, mushrooms, I'll eat them.
00:02:39.400 | Was that it or was it a dedicated research process?
00:02:44.400 | And who'd you talk to?
00:02:46.920 | What was it all about?
00:02:48.380 | - So let's go way back to my undergrad experience.
00:02:54.200 | And there were many reasons that I ended up
00:02:57.120 | going to Princeton.
00:02:58.240 | I think I was very lucky to get in.
00:03:00.600 | My SAT scores, because I could never finish the damn test.
00:03:03.440 | I was so much of a perfectionist.
00:03:04.560 | I'd get stuck and ended up not doing terribly well,
00:03:07.520 | but through essays and other things,
00:03:09.640 | ultimately was able to go.
00:03:11.740 | Part of the draw for me-- - Well, let me interrupt you
00:03:13.000 | and just say, I think at this point we can say
00:03:15.400 | they were lucky to have you.
00:03:16.560 | - Well, thank you for saying that.
00:03:18.000 | Thank you for saying that.
00:03:18.920 | - Great institution.
00:03:19.760 | And you've done great.
00:03:20.600 | And you're a great poster on the wall for them.
00:03:24.760 | - Oh, really? - I hope so.
00:03:26.520 | - Really, really.
00:03:27.480 | Yeah, I just want to say it, 'cause you're not going to.
00:03:29.760 | And I think it's important that these are great institutions
00:03:32.080 | that great minds go through there.
00:03:33.360 | And Einstein went through there.
00:03:37.280 | And their success rests not just on the Einsteins,
00:03:40.240 | but also on the student body
00:03:41.880 | and what they go out into the world and do,
00:03:43.320 | and not just in the realm of science.
00:03:45.120 | So really, they're lucky to have had you.
00:03:47.360 | - Yeah, thank you, Andrew.
00:03:48.920 | I studied Chinese in a room where Einstein used to teach.
00:03:51.320 | It's pretty cool to set foot and spend time weekly
00:03:55.480 | in a space that was shared by some of these people.
00:03:57.600 | - Amazing.
00:03:58.440 | - It really gets the imagination firing.
00:04:01.840 | If we go back to that chapter in my life,
00:04:05.160 | I was initially a psychology major
00:04:08.760 | with a focus on neuroscience.
00:04:10.240 | So I wanted to be a neuroscientist.
00:04:12.360 | And there are many reasons for that.
00:04:14.760 | I have neurodegenerative disease on both sides of my family,
00:04:17.800 | so Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
00:04:20.960 | So that was certainly a personal driving interest
00:04:25.320 | in terms of looking at mechanisms,
00:04:27.840 | understanding what therapeutics existed or did not exist,
00:04:31.200 | how things were developing in the research.
00:04:33.680 | And while I was there,
00:04:35.600 | which later I ended up switching gears and transferring
00:04:40.640 | to focus on language acquisition and East Asian studies,
00:04:43.400 | hence the Chinese that I mentioned earlier
00:04:45.120 | and Japanese and Korean.
00:04:46.080 | But on the neuroscience side,
00:04:48.240 | there were a lot of cool breakthroughs also
00:04:50.920 | that came out of Princeton around that time,
00:04:54.920 | looking at the amazing discovery of, say, neuronal,
00:04:59.680 | I don't wanna say regenesis,
00:05:02.520 | but neurogenesis in the hippocampus.
00:05:04.640 | - Yeah, Ms. Gould's work.
00:05:05.480 | - Exactly, exactly.
00:05:07.040 | So there was quite a bit happening at that time.
00:05:09.040 | I was a subject.
00:05:10.280 | I loved volunteering for studies
00:05:12.080 | just to try to get an inside look
00:05:14.520 | at how things were done
00:05:16.400 | in some of Daniel Kahneman's experiments.
00:05:19.360 | So it was a cool time to be there.
00:05:21.760 | And within the first two years, I wanna say,
00:05:25.960 | I had my first experience recreationally with mushrooms.
00:05:29.960 | And looking back now,
00:05:33.200 | I'm horrified by the lack of control,
00:05:36.640 | and meaning not control, but lack of supervision, right?
00:05:39.280 | I mean, the setting, the set and setting ended up being fine.
00:05:42.600 | Nothing terrible happened,
00:05:43.640 | but there were a lot of ways it could have gone sideways.
00:05:46.120 | But that first experience,
00:05:48.000 | and I must have consumed in retrospect
00:05:49.720 | just a dizzying amount of mushrooms.
00:05:52.320 | - This would be in excess of five grams.
00:05:54.120 | - It would have been more, yeah.
00:05:55.400 | Just knowing what I know now,
00:05:56.440 | it would have been pretty--
00:05:57.920 | - Kids don't do this at all.
00:05:59.600 | - Don't do that.
00:06:00.640 | - I'm not gonna say don't do it at home.
00:06:02.040 | Don't do it at all.
00:06:02.880 | - Yeah, yeah.
00:06:03.720 | - Please, I actually don't think
00:06:05.160 | the young developing brain
00:06:08.120 | should be exposed to psychedelics.
00:06:09.960 | - We can talk about that.
00:06:10.800 | - We can talk about that.
00:06:11.640 | - Yeah, we can talk about that.
00:06:12.480 | - I'm gonna take my stance.
00:06:13.320 | I'm gonna take my stance for now.
00:06:14.840 | - Yeah, I mean, in the world in which we live,
00:06:18.160 | in the US, I would totally agree with you.
00:06:22.240 | There are some interesting cultural exceptions
00:06:24.280 | in other places where things are more set up
00:06:27.960 | to provide for that type of use,
00:06:31.160 | but I certainly would not recommend it.
00:06:33.760 | But coming back to my recreational experience,
00:06:36.720 | my subjective experience was so bizarre,
00:06:39.960 | and my experience of time so nonlinear,
00:06:44.760 | my experience of self so different
00:06:48.400 | from anything I had experienced up to that point,
00:06:51.160 | and therefore my construction of reality
00:06:55.680 | being so completely unlike anything I had experienced
00:07:00.440 | was enough to make me want to learn about these compounds.
00:07:03.680 | And very early on, I still have a scan of it somewhere.
00:07:08.680 | I think it was in 1998 or '99, I actually wrote a paper.
00:07:12.440 | One of my junior papers was focused
00:07:15.120 | on examining potential similarities
00:07:17.760 | between REM sleep and LSD, LSD-25,
00:07:22.760 | and looking at some of the patterns of neural activity.
00:07:29.080 | Of course, we can do a lot more now
00:07:31.280 | with the tools that we have available,
00:07:33.480 | but from a scientific perspective,
00:07:35.640 | I was very curious about how much we knew
00:07:40.240 | and how much we didn't know.
00:07:42.600 | And I would say that latter category
00:07:44.480 | gets me more excited in a way.
00:07:46.360 | And I'm like, okay, how much room is there for growth here?
00:07:51.360 | Because if we're just putting on the finishing touches
00:07:53.960 | with marginal, incremental improvements
00:07:57.360 | on something that we feel like we've largely figured out,
00:07:59.400 | that's less interesting to me
00:08:00.760 | than something that baffles most people
00:08:04.400 | examining them on some level.
00:08:06.520 | And there was a professor named Barry Jacobs
00:08:08.400 | who was doing some very interesting work.
00:08:09.880 | He did a lot of work looking at the serotonergic systems
00:08:13.400 | and did a lot of work with cats.
00:08:16.040 | Ultimately, I could not do personally
00:08:19.200 | the animal work required of the sort of indentured servitude
00:08:23.440 | that I would take home.
00:08:25.280 | - I think you wrote someplace once,
00:08:27.440 | you said when confronted with the prospect
00:08:31.160 | of installing a computer printer
00:08:34.040 | into the head of a cat. - A printer jack.
00:08:35.320 | - A printer jack. - On the back of a cat head.
00:08:36.480 | - On the back of a cat head.
00:08:37.600 | - They literally had those little VGA ports
00:08:41.040 | on the back of these cats' heads,
00:08:42.560 | because cats sleep a lot
00:08:43.640 | and so they're interesting to study.
00:08:45.280 | - Very few laboratories work on cats any longer.
00:08:49.280 | It's mostly a mouse, still some non-human primate work.
00:08:51.920 | My laboratory is essentially shut down
00:08:54.320 | or is in the process of shutting down even our mouse work.
00:08:56.680 | I much prefer to work on humans.
00:08:58.840 | They can give consent and they house themselves.
00:09:01.520 | The animal research thing is tough.
00:09:03.000 | For any sentient being, it's tough.
00:09:06.600 | - For what it's worth, the cats seem pretty happy.
00:09:08.360 | They were just sleeping.
00:09:09.200 | I mean, the ports were for tracking.
00:09:11.760 | So the cats were pretty, I mean, they were just normal cats.
00:09:14.440 | The cats were fine, but I would have been,
00:09:16.360 | we would have been injecting retroviruses into rats
00:09:19.600 | and then perfusing them, which means bleeding them to death
00:09:22.600 | to avoid bruising of the tissue,
00:09:25.360 | because then if you're gonna take thin slices and scans,
00:09:28.120 | you didn't want to have bruising.
00:09:29.800 | And I just couldn't do it.
00:09:32.160 | I think it's important.
00:09:33.200 | I do think, I do think there's a place for it,
00:09:37.320 | but I couldn't do it.
00:09:38.160 | So that's why I transferred out.
00:09:39.320 | But the point I was trying to make
00:09:40.880 | is that I had the experience
00:09:43.320 | and then I had that drive, the scientific interest.
00:09:47.720 | And then I had probably one experience per year
00:09:51.760 | for a few years after that.
00:09:54.680 | And what I noticed for myself personally,
00:09:58.240 | because I suffered from major depressive disorder
00:10:01.440 | and extended depressive episodes,
00:10:04.280 | let's just say on average three to four a year.
00:10:06.160 | And by extended-
00:10:07.600 | - Even before you had started all of this.
00:10:08.920 | - Oh, even before, yeah.
00:10:09.960 | - From a young age.
00:10:10.800 | - Yeah, from a very young age.
00:10:11.640 | And I would say, so let's just call it three to four
00:10:13.880 | on average a year.
00:10:15.160 | Those could last each a few weeks or a few months.
00:10:18.160 | I mean, this is a very high percentage of my total year.
00:10:23.000 | And when I had these higher dose experiences with mushrooms,
00:10:27.720 | so we're talking about psilocybin mushrooms.
00:10:29.400 | And then if we're looking at the molecule
00:10:31.960 | that's being examined scientifically, psilocybin,
00:10:34.960 | I noticed this afterglow effect that was really durable.
00:10:40.040 | And that was an antidepressant effect
00:10:43.960 | or a mood elevating effect
00:10:45.600 | that lasted far longer than the half-life could explain.
00:10:49.520 | Four to six hours, you're kind of on the other side.
00:10:53.640 | And I would experience this afterglow effect
00:10:57.520 | for three to six months.
00:10:59.400 | And that raised all sorts of interesting questions.
00:11:02.080 | What the hell is going on here?
00:11:03.720 | Is it the content?
00:11:05.120 | Is it some structural change?
00:11:06.440 | There were a lot of unanswered questions for me.
00:11:08.640 | And then I had a very, very scary experience
00:11:11.440 | that led me to completely stop use of psychedelics
00:11:15.600 | where, again, uncontrolled environment,
00:11:18.440 | ended up in rural New York,
00:11:23.000 | coming out of my trip, standing in the middle of the road
00:11:25.040 | in the middle of the night with headlights coming at me.
00:11:26.920 | - Goodness gracious.
00:11:27.920 | - So you don't wanna do that.
00:11:29.080 | And I was like, okay, too dangerous.
00:11:30.760 | - Were you taking them alone?
00:11:31.880 | Is that how that is?
00:11:32.720 | - I was taking them with two friends
00:11:33.760 | and my two friends, without telling me,
00:11:35.680 | just went for a walk and left me alone.
00:11:38.200 | So don't do that.
00:11:39.040 | - It points to the, I mean, these are powerful compounds.
00:11:41.920 | - Yeah, you're playing with nuclear power.
00:11:44.760 | Like these are the, this is the nuclear power
00:11:47.920 | of psychological or psycho-emotional surgery
00:11:52.920 | is the way I encourage people to think about them.
00:11:58.040 | And I stopped using any psychedelics completely.
00:12:02.440 | I was still very interested in them,
00:12:04.800 | but I basically hit pause.
00:12:08.040 | And I didn't revisit that until, let's call it 2012, 2013,
00:12:12.800 | where I was still struggling
00:12:13.920 | with major depressive disorder.
00:12:15.040 | And I saw my girlfriend at the time completely transformed
00:12:18.160 | by supervised facilitated use of, in this case,
00:12:22.280 | ayahuasca, which was not quite as common
00:12:26.280 | as it is in conversation at the time.
00:12:30.600 | And she did that in South America,
00:12:32.400 | but she not only explained her experience,
00:12:37.400 | but I was able to see the transformation in her
00:12:41.280 | that seemed to have some durability over time.
00:12:44.080 | And that is when I started stepping back
00:12:46.440 | into researching psychedelics,
00:12:50.240 | looking at what had been published in the last,
00:12:53.240 | let's just call it 10 years as of that point in time.
00:12:57.920 | And thinking about how I would approach it systematically
00:13:02.920 | with safeguards, with proper supervision,
00:13:07.280 | and basically approaching it the way I would have approached
00:13:09.240 | any of the topics in the 4-Hour Body.
00:13:11.640 | And that is what led me back into,
00:13:15.160 | along with a number of other interventions, I should say,
00:13:17.760 | so I wasn't betting the farm on psychedelics.
00:13:20.160 | I also started TM at that point.
00:13:22.760 | I was--
00:13:23.600 | - Excuse yourself.
00:13:24.440 | Some people might, Transcendental Meditation.
00:13:27.280 | These are like four to 10 day meditation retreats.
00:13:31.040 | - This was actually much shorter.
00:13:32.160 | It was a two or three day training.
00:13:33.960 | And you're visiting the instructor,
00:13:37.040 | I wanna say it's once or twice a day,
00:13:38.840 | probably once a day,
00:13:40.160 | and getting up to speed.
00:13:41.520 | And I did this because I was going through
00:13:44.480 | a period of acute stress.
00:13:47.480 | This was finishing the 4-Hour Chef.
00:13:49.920 | This was actually probably in the years preceding that.
00:13:53.080 | And I had one friend who I'd seen really change
00:13:57.880 | from let's just call hyperkinetic high anxiety
00:14:00.840 | to low anxiety.
00:14:03.320 | And he said, "You have the time, you have the money,
00:14:05.920 | "pay for the course, just take it."
00:14:08.360 | Yes, there are all these criticisms of TM.
00:14:10.600 | Yes, there are all these weird historical anecdotes
00:14:13.000 | of people trying to levitate and all this weirdness.
00:14:15.200 | Just ignore that.
00:14:16.200 | - Trying to levitate, nothing against that.
00:14:17.920 | If you actually levitate, then we gotta have a discussion.
00:14:20.360 | But trying to levitate seems like it.
00:14:21.640 | - Why not?
00:14:22.480 | - Every kid tries all sorts of things.
00:14:24.520 | - Give it a go.
00:14:25.360 | He's like, "Just put that aside."
00:14:27.440 | Because I kept coming up with pushback.
00:14:30.120 | And he's like, "Look, all I'm saying is
00:14:32.520 | "it's like a warm bath for your mind
00:14:33.840 | "that you take twice a day
00:14:34.680 | "and it'll chill you the fuck out.
00:14:35.880 | "So try it."
00:14:36.760 | And I was like, "Okay, fine."
00:14:37.600 | - That's a good endorsement.
00:14:38.440 | - I was like, at this point,
00:14:39.800 | I had been burning the candle at both ends so intensely.
00:14:43.720 | It's like, "Okay."
00:14:44.680 | So there was TM, and then I began examining
00:14:46.880 | how I might approach.
00:14:48.000 | Notice I didn't just jump into using them.
00:14:49.840 | I was like, "How could I approach taking psychedelics
00:14:52.800 | "in a logical sequence with proper protections,
00:14:57.800 | "with safety assurances?"
00:15:00.440 | And that took me probably a month or two.
00:15:04.560 | And I was right in the middle of things.
00:15:06.000 | Northern California, you have access to a lot.
00:15:08.560 | And only then did I start looking at
00:15:11.800 | having my own experiences.
00:15:14.040 | And lo and behold, I mean, I'll cut to the chase,
00:15:17.400 | but the personal outcome,
00:15:20.600 | and there are many different benefits and risks
00:15:24.960 | I should make very clear.
00:15:26.480 | These things can be extremely dangerous in certain ways.
00:15:29.520 | Generally, not physiologically, but they can be dangerous.
00:15:33.640 | I would say instead of three to four times per year
00:15:36.400 | on average, I probably have one depressive episode
00:15:39.840 | every two years.
00:15:41.360 | - That's a significant improvement.
00:15:43.640 | - Right.
00:15:44.480 | I mean, from a quality of life perspective,
00:15:46.360 | those are two different people.
00:15:48.080 | And that then led me to,
00:15:52.280 | and as I did with all my workouts, right,
00:15:54.320 | I took copious notes over the span.
00:15:58.400 | I mean, now we're looking at 10 plus years.
00:16:01.800 | So if I were to ever write another book,
00:16:04.320 | it would probably be related to all of the really
00:16:07.400 | fine details of the experiments and my learnings,
00:16:13.480 | including some of the more bizarre things
00:16:16.360 | over the last 10 years.
00:16:17.400 | But it would be just a beast to create.
00:16:20.960 | - With psychedelics, experiences with psychedelics.
00:16:23.800 | - Psychedelics and sort of psychedelic adjacent,
00:16:27.480 | non-ordinary experiences of consciousness,
00:16:32.160 | which I think often are touching at edges of the same thing,
00:16:37.160 | which is gonna be controversial for some folks.
00:16:40.080 | But to come back to the storyline,
00:16:42.080 | just to put a bow on that,
00:16:43.600 | when I saw the personal outcomes for me,
00:16:48.840 | the anecdata from friends who are facilitators
00:16:52.560 | who have worked with thousands of people, right,
00:16:55.120 | which is a pretty good sample size.
00:16:57.440 | Still anecdote, but these are people who are very smart,
00:17:00.760 | who keep records.
00:17:02.440 | And I believe that these people have spotted patterns
00:17:06.600 | that are only going to be possible to test and verify
00:17:10.120 | over the next five to 10 years.
00:17:11.560 | So I, at least as a means of generating hypotheses,
00:17:16.480 | I take these people very seriously.
00:17:18.580 | And then I started to connect with scientists
00:17:23.200 | whose work I had read,
00:17:24.120 | like Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins,
00:17:27.080 | began looking at the most compelling data
00:17:29.160 | related to say MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
00:17:31.880 | and complex PTSD.
00:17:34.400 | I made the commitment to myself
00:17:39.520 | that as soon as I had enough money to move the dial,
00:17:42.160 | 'cause I really felt like these tools
00:17:44.560 | were so outside of the normal paradigm
00:17:47.680 | of psychiatry and pharmacology.
00:17:51.000 | And that made me very excited because it was uncrowded.
00:17:53.600 | There was very little funding coming into the space.
00:17:56.200 | It was high leverage.
00:17:57.280 | And I looked at it just as I've looked at
00:17:59.040 | my many startup investments.
00:18:00.660 | Limited downside risk, really high upside potential.
00:18:05.000 | And I should say before that,
00:18:07.000 | I'd already been funding in a very small way science.
00:18:11.440 | So the first check I ever wrote was personally
00:18:14.400 | to Adam Ghazali's lab at UCSF.
00:18:17.040 | - Yeah, great lab.
00:18:17.920 | - Which at the time was looking at software.
00:18:22.020 | He's not gonna like this description,
00:18:23.320 | but I'm gonna simplify it.
00:18:24.660 | Software that might attenuate
00:18:27.160 | or reverse age-related cognitive impairment,
00:18:30.500 | specifically related to various aspects of attention.
00:18:36.040 | And that was my first foray into funding
00:18:40.440 | early stage science, which was very analogous to me
00:18:43.680 | to funding early stage startups.
00:18:46.080 | And then later on, to touch on the reputational thing,
00:18:49.080 | I know this is a TED Talk, so thank you for listening.
00:18:51.360 | - No, this is great.
00:18:52.740 | Please, you're always so gracious on your podcast.
00:18:55.760 | This is what people want.
00:18:56.820 | This is certainly what I wanna hear.
00:18:58.740 | - So on the reputational side, you're right that
00:19:01.580 | at the time, especially, let's just call it 2013 to 2015,
00:19:06.580 | this was not a comfortable national conversation
00:19:10.260 | of any type.
00:19:11.100 | - Yeah, I wouldn't have had this conversation back then.
00:19:12.940 | - No way.
00:19:13.860 | - I don't know that I would have lost my job.
00:19:15.660 | It just would have raised a lot of eyebrows.
00:19:17.500 | Now such studies are happening at Stanford.
00:19:19.340 | - Yeah, the perception was that these are
00:19:24.120 | a professional third rail, at the very least, right?
00:19:27.640 | Also illegal, therefore, if I talk about them,
00:19:30.780 | am I giving someone probable cause?
00:19:32.560 | Am I gonna get myself in some type
00:19:34.160 | of really tricky legal situation, et cetera?
00:19:36.520 | There are a lot of considerations.
00:19:38.160 | But I tested that, just like I was saying,
00:19:41.840 | I like to capture my assumptions on paper
00:19:43.720 | so I can stress this.
00:19:44.560 | And I was like, okay, I think that might be true.
00:19:48.160 | Most people I know think that is true.
00:19:50.460 | But is it true?
00:19:51.420 | How could we test to see if that is true or not?
00:19:54.800 | And I decided to crowdfund for a Hopkins pilot study
00:19:59.800 | looking at psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.
00:20:04.640 | And I thought to myself, okay, we have a couple of things
00:20:09.640 | falling in our favor here.
00:20:11.820 | Number one, depression does not discriminate.
00:20:14.840 | So across socioeconomic classes, across gender,
00:20:17.500 | across race, this is a problem.
00:20:20.020 | Almost everyone knows someone who takes antidepressants
00:20:23.840 | who is still depressed.
00:20:25.120 | Okay, treatment-resistant depression, therefore,
00:20:28.500 | is the indication, psilocybin is the intervention.
00:20:33.240 | Let me crowdfund, and I did that throughout the time,
00:20:36.960 | CrowdRise, which was co-founded by Edward Norton,
00:20:39.920 | who had become a friend and was--
00:20:41.440 | - The actor, Edward Norton. - The actor,
00:20:42.520 | who's very smart, very, very, very smart.
00:20:45.340 | Also one of the best investors I've ever met,
00:20:47.720 | which a lot of people don't know.
00:20:49.120 | Very bright guy.
00:20:50.500 | And so crowdfunded, and I also like to put my money
00:20:55.500 | where my mouth is.
00:20:57.000 | I said, okay, guys, I'm gonna seed this.
00:20:58.600 | I'm putting in X, the goal is to raise,
00:21:00.800 | I think it was 80,000, something like that,
00:21:03.120 | for the following study.
00:21:04.800 | And then I was like, let's see, let's see what happens.
00:21:07.880 | And there was basically zero negative blowback.
00:21:13.680 | And not only was there no discernible negative blowback,
00:21:17.700 | a number of people, and this was deliberate,
00:21:19.740 | I wanted to see this, a number of people
00:21:21.220 | came out of the woodwork to support in a bigger way.
00:21:24.080 | And I was like, oh, okay, I see you.
00:21:26.220 | A handful of folks I knew, and I was like, oh, interesting.
00:21:28.700 | Okay, there are at least a half a dozen folks
00:21:31.460 | who are studying the same thing,
00:21:34.380 | who are paying attention to the same thing.
00:21:36.540 | And then I just got bolder.
00:21:37.700 | I was like, okay, if I tested that, let me push,
00:21:41.500 | and then let's see what happens, and I'll wait.
00:21:44.160 | And lo and behold, I realized that the perception
00:21:48.680 | did not match the reality.
00:21:49.800 | The reality was, if you're talking about indications
00:21:52.340 | that cause an incredible amount of suffering
00:21:54.280 | for a very large number of people,
00:21:56.520 | even those who are anti-drug, per se,
00:22:02.040 | just say no to drugs, want solutions.
00:22:04.940 | (upbeat music)
00:22:08.340 | (upbeat music)
00:22:10.920 | (upbeat music)